Reinvention Once More
Syndicated columnist Michael Barone has a piece in which he gives praise to a book that argues America, and the western welfare state model generally, is coming very close to the day in which its impossible financial obligations dramatically outweigh its ability to pay for them. The weight of our debt is seemingly only surpassed by the short-sightedness and passivity of our politicians. Barone writes:
“The major problems are that democracies in America and elsewhere have been making promises they cannot keep, and they are now running out of money. Social Security and Medicare threaten to squeeze defense and other domestic spending to the lowest shares of the economy in a half-century. And government can’t do things it used to. The Pentagon, still one of the world’s largest buildings, was built in 18 months in the early 1940s. A small bridge nearby recently took four years to repair.”
Something as mundane as the length of time needed to build a bridge is only a symptom of the larger systemic problem of government imposed sclerosis on our society. The challenges facing our country are profound. But as Ronald Reagan said in his first inaugural “We are not, as some would have us believe, doomed to an inevitable decline.” It’s up to us to renew our American principles. Read Barone’s entire column here.
